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Homemade Croissants

I certainly didn’t get these exactly right. Croissants are created by “laminating” a yeasted dough with butter. You form the butter into a block, encase it with dough, roll it out, and fold it up. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and you get something like 81 layers dough and butter. Bake it and you get those wondefully flaky croissants.

The trick is that the butter and the dough have to be the same temperature to roll out together, which (in part) is why there is so much refrigeration involved. Still, I didn’t manage to get them in sync — my butter must have been too cold and it ended up distributed through the dough in large shards and streaks. However, much like my puff pastry (per Nick Malgieri’s great recipe done the “easy way”), this didn’t hurt the final product (and is probably the idea behind Malgieri’s method and why it works). These croissants were amazing–I can only imagine if I had gotten the technique right!

Obviously, I hope to try these homemade croissants again soon, and with practice will hopefully get the “laminating” right. But it’s great to know that I don’t have to sweat it and even if I don’t get the butter distribution down, these are still more delicious than most croissants you can find in the store. (And don’t even think about those fast food “croissan’wiches”–blasphemy!).